I'm offically a MCTS using SharePoint and Window Shared Services, wrote them both the same day not sure if they were easy or I'm just that lucky, I've been going hardcore admin mode for the last 5 months doing the Architecture Design and planning for the implementation. I showed a recent trainer from Datacogs and he was sure we used Microsoft for our infrastructure but in reality is was myself and a couple of other bright guys that figured it out, it wasn't till later that we seen design diagrams from the Microsoft team and it was brought to out attention that our design was exactly how Microsoft invisioned there software to be implemented.
We have a 9 server implementation for Development env – 1 Certifiacate Server, 1 Report server, 1 Services server, 2 App servers, Index server, 2005 Sql Server, Active direcory, File server.